A Floating World

By

Martin Rubin

October 1, 2011

In 1954, 11-year-old Michael Ondaatje left his native Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) on the Oronsay, a newly built ship of the venerable Orient Line. Despite his tender age, he made the journey on his own, something that bothered him less than the fear that, when he met up again in England with his mother, whom he had not seen in years, the two of them might not recognize each other.

In "The Cat's Table," Mr. Ondaatje's latest novel, an 11-year-old boy named Michael makes the long journey in 1954 from his native Ceylon to England—across the Arabian Sea, up the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean, up the French coast to the English Channel and the Thames Estuary—on a ship called the Oronsay. At the end of the journey, Michael meets his mother, whom he has not seen in years.

Is "The Cat's Table" merely disguised autobiography? In an author's note, Mr. Ondaatje concedes that the novel may have "the colouring and locations of memoir," but, he insists, "the ship in the novel is an imagined rendering." And there is every reason to believe him. There is too much occurring on the Oronsay that could never happen on such a voyage in real life, from the most basic arrangements of the passengers and amenities to all manner of mayhem and incident.

Early in the novel, the narrator, writing from the perspective of the present day, says that he is trying "to imagine who the boy on the ship was." The novel then moves seamlessly into a first-person tale from the time of the events themselves, capturing the immediacy of an 11-year-old's reactions to being plunged into an amazing world full of things never before encountered. Along the way, sequel moments and retrospective insights—about early childhood, about schooldays and future romance—are embedded in the narrative, shifting time back and forth artfully and giving a larger frame to events, conveying a sense of the sea journey's role in Michael's larger destiny.

ENLARGE

The liner Oronsay leaves Melbourne with passengers bound for England in February 1953.
Getty Images

The Cat's Table

By Michael Ondaatje Knopf, 269 pages, $26

None of this artfulness will surprise readers who remember "The English Patient" (1992). "The Cat's Table" is just as skillfully wrought as Mr. Ondaatje's magnum opus, but its picaresque childhood adventure gives it a special power and intimacy.

For the young passenger on the Oronsay, the newness of experience is in part mundane. Michael sleeps under a blanket for the first time and encounters the bland food and insipid tea so typical of a British liner of the era and so startling to anyone used to the spicy food and fragrant tea of Ceylon. But Michael soon befriends a pair of young boys roughly his own age, one of whom he recognizes from his boarding school back home. The three boys, usually together but at times on separate ventures, go everywhere on the ship, taking in the strangeness of the floating world, observing everyone and everything, from illicit couplings in lifeboats to the (very different) heat and sweat of the engine room. Nothing seems out of bounds, from the emergency stock of chocolate bars in the lifeboats to the poisonous plants in the ship's garden.

So eager are the boys for experience that at one point, when a storm seems imminent, they lash themselves to a bollard on the open promenade deck, near the bow of the ship, in order to feel the full force of nature's fury on their bodies—and on their consciousness.

Of course, they get a bit more than they bargained for. With typical vividness, Mr. Ondaatje writes (in Michael's voice): "Then the gale hit and pulled the air out of our mouth. We had to turn our heads away from its rush in order to breathe, the wind buckling like metal around us. We'd imagined lying there conversing in wonder about the lights of the storm at some great height above us, but we were now almost drowning from the water in the air—the rain, and the sea that was leaping over the railings and swirling across the deck. Lightning lit the rain in the air above us, and then it was dark once more. . . . Whenever the ship ploughed into the oncoming sea, we were swept around within the surf, unbreathing, while the stern rose into the air, the propellers out of their element screaming till they fell back down into the sea, and we on the bow leapt up again, unnaturally."

In such a moment, life on a sleek modern ocean liner—at least for these mischievous passengers—begins to resemble the rough-and-tumble of a ship in a novel by Herman Melville. The boys, rescued from their terror, receive a fearsome dressing down from an irate captain (shades of Melville again).

Mr. Ondaatje's fictional Oronsay has other sinister aspects more associated with Melville's maritime world than with the placid shipboard life half a century ago. A manacled prisoner, heavily guarded, takes his exercise late at night but not too late for Michael and his friends to achieve their goal of witnessing his eerie stroll. The boys have already managed to break into the ship's armory and handle the firearms and handcuffs there. Soon they are assisting thievery and smuggling. And in their wanderings they witness a violent death and a suicide.

Despite such events—at times there is an almost magic-realist quality to the shipboard goings-on—"The Cat's Table" is well-grounded in reality. After a sandstorm wreaks havoc on the Oronsay's paint during its transit of the Suez Canal, Michael watches sailors touch the ship up—in the distinctive yellow of the Orient Line. Mr. Ondaatje borrows the phrase "cat's table" from a German landlubber term for the place where the lowest of the low dine. It well fits the misfits who occupy the novel's own cat's table—as far as possible from the captain's own.

Such dining arrangements remind us that there are indeed classes on the fictional Oronsay, just as there were on the real one. Mr. Ondaatje handles the class distinctions onboard in a matter-of-fact way, noting them but not making too much of them. This attitude of matter-of-factness extends, admirably, to matters of race. Inevitably on such a voyage there is a racial and ethnic mix of passengers, and young Michael can see the full range. But Mr. Ondaatje makes no attempt to weigh down the boy's observations with subtexts about colonialism or racism.

Indeed, Mr. Ondaatje is too skilled a writer to indulge in postcolonial pieties and clichés. He is rather a master at creating characters, whom he chooses to present, memorably, as individuals. This choice is of a piece with the freshness and originality that are the hallmarks of "The Cat's Table."

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